The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty [42]
Laurel had stood panic-stricken, holding a biscuit in a frozen gesture of appeal.
“They’re just Grandma’s pigeons.”
Her grandmother smoothed Laurel’s already too straight hair and pushed it behind her ears. “They’re just hungry.”
But Laurel had kept the pigeons under eye in their pigeon house and had already seen a pair of them sticking their beaks down each other’s throats, gagging each other, eating out of each other’s craws, swallowing down all over again what had been swallowed before: they were taking turns. The first time, she hoped they might never do it again, but they did it again next day while the other pigeons copied them. They convinced her that they could not escape each other and could not themselves be escaped from. So when the pigeons flew down, she tried to position herself behind her grandmother’s skirt, which was long and black, but her grandmother said again, “They’re just hungry, like we are.”
No more than Laurel had known that rivers ran clear and sang over rocks might her mother have known that her mother’s pigeons were waiting to pluck each other’s tongues out. “Up home,” just as Laurel was in Mount Salus, her mother was too happy to know what went on in the outside world. Besides, when her mother looked closely, it was not in order to see pigeons but to verify something—the truth or a mistake; hers or another’s. Laurel was ashamed to tell anybody else before she told her mother; as a result the pigeons were considered Laurel’s pets.
“Come on!” cried “the boys” to Grandma. “Let the little beggar feed her pigeons!”
Parents and children take turns back and forth, changing places, protecting and protesting each other: so it seemed to the child.
Sometimes the top of the mountain was higher than the flying birds. Sometimes even clouds lay down the hill, hiding the treetops farther down. The highest house, the deepest well, the tuning of the strings; sleep in the clouds; Queen’s Shoals; the fastest conversations on earth—no wonder her mother needed nothing else!
Eventually her father would come for them—he would be called “Mr. McKelva”; and they would go home on the train. They had taken a trunk with them—this trunk, with all the dresses made in this room: they might have stayed always. Her father had not appeared to realize it. They came back to Mount Salus. “Where do they get the mount?” her mother said scornfully. “There’s no ‘mount’ here.”
Grandma had died unexpectedly; she was alone. From the top of the stairs Laurel had heard her mother crying uncontrollably: the first time she had ever heard anyone cry uncontrollably except herself.
“I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there!”
“You are not to blame yourself, Becky, do you hear me?”
“You can’t make me lie to myself, Clinton!”
They raised their voices, cried out back and forth, as if grief could be fabricated into an argument to comfort itself with. When, some time later, Laurel asked about the bell, her mother replied calmly that how good a bell was depended on the distance away your children had gone.
Laurel’s own mother, after her sight was gone, lay in bed in the big room reciting to herself sometimes as she had done on horseback at sixteen to make the long ride over the mountain go faster. She did not like being read to, she preferred to do the reading, she said now. “ ‘If the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?’ ” she had asked, the most reckless expression on her wasted face. She knew Dr. Courtland’s step, and greeted him with “ ‘Man, proud man! Dress’t in a little brief authority!’ ”
“Don’t let them tie me down,” her mother had whispered on the evening before the last of the operations. “If they try to hold me, I’ll die.